December 07, 2006

Woe! Woe! Woe!

by hilzoy

According to Ecclesiastes, "In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Unfortunately for me, this is not one of the passages that makes me doubt the Bible's inerrancy. Unfortunately for you, misery loves company, and so I'm about to pass on some of that miserable, grief-inducing knowledge. Foreign Policy, where praktike has taken up residence, has a list of products whose production makes the world worse. It only includes five items, so, one might have thought, the chances are pretty good that they'll all be things that I have no interest in, like X-boxes or trophy wives or hand-knit toilet seat covers. No such luck. The misery-inducing item begins innocently enough: it's titled 'Candy Bars'. Fine: I haven't eaten candy bars since I was a kid. But as I read on, I realized that what 'candy bars' means, in this context, is chocolate. And that's something else altogether.

"Candy Bars

Beware of: Cocoa powder

The cost: Child labor. Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa (and most of the United States’) comes from West Africa, where nearly 300,000 children under the age of 14 toil in dangerous conditions on cocoa plantations. In the Ivory Coast, where more than half of the region’s cocoa is produced, more than 100,000 children work in near slavery, subject to both injury from the machetes used to harvest the plant and from toxic pesticides that are banned in the United States and Europe.

The alternative: Buy Fair Trade Certified cocoa, which comes from farms that only employ adults and use legal pesticides. The price is equivalent to that of gourmet chocolate. If you have to get your fix and can’t find Fair Trade chocolate, look for products from Cadbury. The British company buys 90 percent of its cocoa from Ghana, where trafficking of child workers is prohibited.

The future: In October, the World Cocoa Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development announced the establishment of the “Healthy Communities” program to help West African cocoa farmers improve their economic, social, and environmental standards. The program is designed to help as many as 150,000 farm families during the next five years. But with 700,000 farmers in the Ivory Coast alone, it’s unlikely to affect widespread change."

The cost: Environmental damage and human rights. Gold ore is often sprayed with cyanide after extraction to separate the gold from the host minerals. The cyanide-contaminated leftovers, 20 tons of which are used to produce one gold ring, are often abandoned or dumped in nearby water sources. Moreover, gold mines from Indonesia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have notoriously poor labor standards.

The alternative: Currently, there is no certification for “clean” gold, as there is for diamonds, for example. The best option is to buy jewelry from gold that has been recycled. The bad news is that without independent, third-party verification, it is difficult to ensure that your gold is clean. The good news is that, once you find it, clean gold is no more expensive than normal gold.

The future: The human rights group Oxfam America and environmental group Earthworks are pushing a No Dirty Gold campaign for jewelers who demand responsible mining practices. A dozen high-end industry leaders such as Tiffany & Co. and Zale Corp. have already signed on, but mass retailers including Target and Wal-Mart have not. Oxfam and Earthworks also encourage consumers to sign a pledge supporting responsible mining."

Gold? What's next, diamonds? Well, of course, we know about that. (Right?) (And we make sure all of the gorgeous diamonds we buy for our loved ones are properly certified to be conflict-free, since while that doesn't ensure that they aren't conflict diamonds, it lowers the odds, right? Right?)

Check out the list: teak furniture and cell phones are on it too. (I knew about those.) And their blog has a link to a really odd story. Apparently, there's a virtual world called Second Life. (I had never heard of it before. I tried a MUD or something once and found it spectacularly boring, perhaps because I chose to be a windowless monad. But I digress.) It occurred to someone to ask: how much energy do the avatars in this world use, per capita? It turns out that they use more energy than the average Brazilian:

"So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.

Now, if we limit the comparison to developed countries, where per-capita energy consumption is 7,702 kWh a year, the avatars appear considerably less energy hungry than the humans. But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do.

More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.

Which means, in turn, that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints.

UPDATE: In a comment on this post, Sun's Dave Douglas takes the calculations another step, translating electricity consumption into CO2 emissions. (Carbon dioxide, he notes, "is the most prevalent greenhouse gas from the production of electricity.") He writes: "looking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That's the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles (or a Prius around 4,000).""

*** Note to conservatives: sometimes, conservatives make fun of things like not eating chocolate produced with child labor, as a form of bizarre liberal guilt. Personally, I think that there would be something wrong with me if I didn't care enough about kids to buy Cadbury chocolate instead of Hershey's. However, I think that any conservative with a libertarian bent should embrace this sort of campaign. It is, after all, just an attempt to correct a market failure: we have inadequate information about many of the products we consume, in particular the conditions in which they are produced and the effects of their production on the environment, and posts like this just allow people to decide, voluntarily, to take that information into account.

Ideally, everyone should act on such information; that's the only way in which our preferences on such matters can be taken into account by purely voluntary, market-oriented mechanisms. If people just don't care about kids being forced to work when they ought to be in school, or captured and sent off to battle at the age of ten because some warlord wants to control a diamond mine, then so be it. But if people do have such preferences and market mechanisms fail to register them, then it seems to me that there will eventually be real pressure for non-market-oriented solutions. If you're a libertarian, or have any libertarian sympathies, you should therefore hope that the market works in these cases; and you should regard people who make fun of campaigns like these, when they are not genuinely amusing, as working against conservative principles.

Comments

I can double-up. Some of the virtual worlds now allow you to purchase avatars with a certain skill-set. The skill-set might take hours to develop (think of levelling up in an RPG), so there's a kind of globalized market now for these digital goods, where first-world money pays third-world labor, often child labor (kids jamming their fingers on keyboards to develop the skills and transfer them). Wish I had some links at the moment.

But now the serious question for any ethicists who might be lurking out there: The idea that we ought to lay off chocolate, given these facts, is surely right. After all, there are alternatives (Cadbury) and, even if there were not, one would think [hope, at least] that laying off the chocolate wouldn't be a grave setback to an individual's quality of life.

But what about cell phones? There are just a whole lot of jobs out there that I couldn't accept if I insisted on not using a cell phone. Am I obligated as well if the cost is a severe restriction on many of my hopes, dreams, ambitions? For some reason, it seems obvious to me that if we were put the choice decide as a collective market between cell phones and the horrible abuse of some improverished country, we would have to lay off the cell phones (after all, then no individual is closing off whole occupational categories, since nobody expects you to use the darned things), but it is not so obvious to me that in the existence of an unjust structure, that an idividual has to unilaterally burden herself at the cost of her life's plans.

A scene out of some Smith & Hawken catalog: sitting out on the patio in teak furniture, wearing gold jewelry with diamond accents, snacking on chocolate, interrupting a virtual world game to take a cell phone call.

Look, what are the countries that have been most exploited by the evil capitalists and how are they doing? Japan, Germany, South Korea, for instance.

So go ahead and support Cuba, Zimbabwe, Palestine, etc., because they are against the cycle of people paying other people what the market bears.

Fine, they produce worthless stuff, or nothing at all, I don't have to pay for it. If we want free trade to end in various counties, well then you want the government to take over everything in those countries. My take is that trade is a deterrent to tyranny. If you want to shut down that, fine, enslave those people to their strongmen. Just don't expect me to be in favor of sending help to the bad guys because they are impoverished, or to care when their dictators denounce the US at the UN.

I'm not sure I understand what Ara is talking about with the cell phone stuff. Is he saying that cell phone service shouldn't exist in remote areas even though wired phone service infrastucture is way too expensive to install, because it exploits the people there?

What is the alternative? No phone service at all?

Perhaps the happy natives prefer sending messages by beating drums or sending runners and the modern world shouldn't meddle with that.

If you're a libertarian, or have any libertarian sympathies, you should therefore hope that the market works in these cases; and you should regard people who make fun of campaigns like these, when they are not genuinely amusing, as working against conservative principles.

Exactly! I've been saying this sort of thing for a while, as a Libertarian who really, sincerely cares about social justice (but distrust's Big Government's benevolent hand in getting us there).

It's been quite literally years since I bought any coffee or tea that wasn't Fairtrade, and I try to buy only Fairtrade chocolate, too.

I don't always succeed in this... but Green and Black chocolate is so good that it's easy not to be so tempted by much else available. It was a real surprise to me to discover that Cadbury's in the US seems to count as luxury foreign chocolate. Then I tasted Hershey's. Uck.

DaveC, the point of Fairtrade is to ensure that people who produce something that we don't need but like to have (coffee, chocolate, etc) get fairly paid a decent price for the work they do: surely a positive goal for anyone? I was working for Oxfam when Fairtrade was launched: but I thought then and think now that it is one of the most practical ideas for grassroots change that I'd ever heard of.

Beware of the Nile Perch - gruesome stuff, but just an example of many.

Generally though I'm sick and tired of this middle class ethical consumer guilt trip thing. I mean honestly, who has the time and the heart to feel guilty every time one buys a snickers at a gas station or orders a mousse au chocolat and a double espresso in a restaurant?

People who advocate change through consumer behavior are still firm believers in the free market. Since I firmly believe that the free market is mostly a myth I call bs. Effectively the government is outsourcing its work to the citizens. Governments (and this includes the so called free marketeers of the Bush admin) slap tariffs and import restrictions on all sorts of things when it suits them, so why should they not be forced to either totally prohibit the import of unethical products or at least increase their price significantly through regulation and label them with big, fat stickers as unethical?

A few high up people in national governments and internationa institutions making such decisions could achieve a million times more in a very short time than a few Guardian readers behaving ethically for the next 40 years. So pressure them and forget the guilt trip - it's more efficient and less annoying.

I submit that what is bad in each case is not the product itself, but the legal system in the country that produces it. Novakant is right -- feel guilty all you like, but it's not going to change things. What's needed is reform at the level of legal and political institutions in the developing world.

So, as a libertarian, I support your right to buy whatever you like, or to abstain from buying whatever you like. I think, though, that the best way to make a difference with regard to child labor, slave labor, and the like, is to support efforts toward political education, legal reform, and good government in the countries that now foster these practices.

I'd guess that the power per avatar computation is not accurate. The rest, sure, informed purchases and all that, but I'm thinking that the 10-15k avatars is the average online usage, and not the power usage per avatar. So yes, people's faux-life personalities might be consuming power at that rate while they're on. Not so much, while they're not on.

One could count blogs this way as well, note. You're typing into your blog from your home computer, which burns power at (say) 150-175 W/hr, and your blog resides on a server that consumes 200 W/hr. And hopefully, your blog is being read by people on computers burning power at 150-175 W/hr.

Once again I wonder which post DaveC actually read before spouting off. Certainly not this one. Regardless, his ever-more-apoplectic responses to Hilzoy are fascinating, in a Mel Gibson/Michael Richards/Danny DeVito fashion (mostly DeVito - if DaveC were a crazy drunk, he'd be a lovable, vertically challenged crazy drunk, ably charming the lovely ladies of The View).

Reminds me of a besotted Uncle at a Christmas get-together several years back who ranted on about Zionist Bankers and black helicopters after someone innocuously mentioned an article on plunging buses they'd seen in the New York Times. (True story, slightly embellished for effect - thank god the peas were fresh.)

Skepticism about the total-transformation possibilities of market pressure is certainly in order, but the fact is that market demand can and does affect things on a fairly wide scale. The Whole Foods chain, for instance, has given a major boost to the organic farming labeling laws in a lot of US states, and opened up business opportunities for organic producers of many kinds. There's a symbiosis of interest and opportunity that is worth more than a drive-by sneer - not as a replacement for politics, but alongside it.

I realized some years ago that many libertarians treat organized purchaser action in the marketplace very much as some kinds of grammarian approach changes in English usage. You'll find few grammarians who flat-out claim that the masses aren't entitled to shape usage, particularly when it comes to historical change - I'm not aware of much sentiment in favor of undoing the great vowel shift, for instance, or trying to roll back to pre-Elizabethan definitions across the board. And yet no effort of today's hoi polloi to shift usage is likely to pass muster, and conscious efforts to encourage alternatives for social or political reasons (like "they" instead of "he" as a third person singular as well as plural pronoun, on the grounds that a bit more than half of us aren't "he") are just right out...unless of course it's a change sanctioned up front by grammarians. That's what it really comes down to: the changes that are okay are the ones that come from the right sort of people.

A lot of libertarians seem exactly like that, except with corporate boards in the place of grammarians. If they decide on a change of policy, that's fine. But it's not fine if they've been pressured into it, which means that any effort to hurt their company's profits by withholding purchases is not okay. Individually, customers are sort of allowed to make decisions for their own reasons, but it's outside manipulation of the market if they try to tell anyone about it, or to organize and coordinate their efforts.

My take is that ideology is a deterrent to fact. I know it's terribly gauche to mention fascism, but c'mon. Read history much? Look at China much?

At the very least, try to add some qualifiers: 'free trade,' or 'private individuals engaging in international trade', or something like that. It wouldn't make it true, but it would at least indicate some CYA foresight.

I find it funny that you mention Cuba, pointing out that it 'produces nothing that we want.' While you weren't looking, they ramped up a pretty impressive biotech infrastructure, and have been selling their wares to a number of other countries. China is a consumer of Cuban biotech goods, for example, and Germany has their new cancer treatment drugs in clinical trials. Just because we're not allowed to buy it doesn't mean it's not valuable.

The existence of those kinds of cases should motivate us to drop our restrictions on trade with Cuba, shouldn't it? That's been the liberal mantra for years: by not buying from them, we've doomed Cubans to poverty. Perhaps you're more liberal than you thought.

(I always wondered how strictly enforced this ban is in the US: how widely available are they? did anybody ever get fined for lighting one up? thrown into jail for importing them like booze smugglers in the prohibition? I can't imagine the bigwigs in Washington and in boardrooms across the country not having a cuban cigar ever so often. Anybody got any superior inisght into this matter? ;) )

Not too happy Bruce uses the term 'grammarian' to describe those types. Safire prefers the term 'language maven', and I would prefer to not lower the term grammarian to the level of Safire and John Simon, who Pinker memorably dissected here:

In recent years the loudest Jeremiah has been the film and theater critic John Simon. Here is a representative opening to one of his language columns:
The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled the merchandise in their slave ships, or as the inmates of concentration camps were dealt with by their Nazi jailers.

What grammatical horror could have inspired this tasteless comparison, you might ask? It was Tip O'Neill's redundantly referring to his "fellow colleagues." Speaking of the American Black English dialect, Simon says:

Why should we consider some, usually poorly educated, subculture's notion of the relationship between sound and meaning? And how could a grammar -- any grammar -- possibly describe that relationship? As for "I be," "you be," "he be," etc., which should give us all the heebie-jeebies, these may indeed be comprehensible, but they go against all accepted classical and modern grammars and are the product not of a language with roots in history but of ignorance of how language works.

This, of course, is nonsense from beginning to end (Black English Vernacular is uncontroversially a language with its own systematic grammar), but there is no point in refuting this malicious know-nothing, for he is not participating in any sincere discussion.

I don't understand the question. I'd guess the avatars are data, while the game logic is a program. The avatars probably actually reside on a sizeable drive array.

I think the point I'm trying to make is power usage is most accurately put in units of W-h per year for the actual login time per user, which is going to come out to a much smaller number than the given one (unless one is logged in and playing 24 hours a day, 365 days per year).

None of this is to dismiss that it's a waste, rather to emphasize that the waste is spread a lot more thinly than implied.

Or you could say there's being something over 6 million kWhr/year wasted on SecondLife, in total. And that's probably overstated by a factor of 2 or more, if 4000 is the processor count, as discussed in the comments section at the linked article. A total waste of power, though, as far as I'm concerned.

Liberal Japonicus: There are lots of grammarians I like and respect, and defer to (which is much more meaningful than just liking). On the other hand, you're right that a bunch of the hard-core harrumphers don't actually have any systematic grounding in how grammar actually works. I'll see if I can remember this the next time I do my own harrumphing.

Don't get me started on Canadian Football. They are systematically trying to weaken our resolve to stick with the running game. It is a slippery slope, like the newfangled soccer style kickers getting in somehow and replacing good Americans like Lou Groza.

I may have been a bit rash about defending cell phones. My wife and kids think it's a remote control to operate DaveC, which is bad in every way. Another warning about phones: Keep at least one wired phone in your house (not that you can get them anywhere.) If you have a big ice storm that knocks out electricity, you may still have phone service, but not if you are totally dependent on those wireless gizmos that need wall outlet power.

I don't think I have to choose between deciding, now, not to buy any chocolate that isn't FT or Cadbury, and also deciding to do whatever I can to affect the relevant laws. In this case, I opt for both. I also deny that this involves being consumed by guilt: it's a simple, one-time decision. Register the fact, decide accordingly, move on.

I think of this as just another way of registering a consumer preference. If I found out that some type of chocolate bar was produced in horribly unsanitary conditions that made it actually dangerous, I would both decide not to eat any such chocolate bar and (depending on the circumstances) possibly to advocate for changes to food safety laws. There's no need to choose between them.

If I had any idea what DaveC's comments had to do with my post, I'd reply.

Ara: hard to give a quick, drive-by response, but I don't think you're obligated not to use cell phones ever, given both the magnitude of your individual purchasing decision's actual effect (small) and the availability of alternate ways of trying to help (e.g., by trying to change the situation that makes this sort of thing possible, and/or by pushing cell companies to be careful about suppliers.) But it's a question that deserves a longer response than this.

I don't understand the question. I'd guess the avatars are data, while the game logic is a program. The avatars probably actually reside on a sizeable drive array.

i guess i just don't understand the point in trying to calculate the cost of one small part of what the game servers do. it'd be like calculating the "cost per JPG" of a web server as total_power_used / JPG_count. if you (generic you) get a big number, you then say "JPGs use too many resources! stop serving JPGs!" well, no. obviously, a web server does more than just serve JPGs: it serves HTML, it runs back-end stuff to generate HTML, it runs databases, it runs security stuff to keep intruders out, etc.. likewise, game servers do more than serve avatars. just turning the servers on without connecting them to the net uses a pretty good amount of power. just don't get the point of singling out "avatars".

i admit that i am probably missing the point here.

Or you could say there's being something over 6 million kWhr/year wasted on SecondLife, in total.

Any suggestions here as to where and how that recycling can actually take place?

many big-box electronics and office supply stores (Best Buy, Office Max, etc) will take cell phones for recycling. don't know about your area, there are a few computer recycling companies around where i live, and our local landfill has a special section for electronics.

Slarti is right about the calculation. Unfortunately, if you do it correctly then you lose the "Avatars use more energy than Brazilians!" headline, and the whole story goes away. I've never played Second Life, but I'm sure there are many hobbies and entertainments that "waste" far more than 6 million kWhr/year. Can we calculate the resources "wasted" on professional sports?

Sure, but you have to be careful with aggregate waste like that. For example, did you know that we waste several tens of billions of kilowatt-hours per year, just by not keeping our car tires properly inflated?

That's just a guess, of course; I could be off by an order of magnitude either way. It all depends on how diligent we all are on that front, on average. I could come up with some really shocking wastage figures by computing how much energy is eaten up by automatic transmissions; it's probably on par with that several tens of billions of kilowatthours. Does anyone really need automatic transmissions, outside of the relatively small disabled population?

Point is, any given activity that's indulged in by a lot of people is going to use up a lot of energy. Some of those activities can be thought of as "better" than others (soccer playing, for instance, results in a higher level of fitness and, reportedly, better overall health) while others are more pure enjoyment (for instance, watching sports. One could argue that being a soccer fan, though, may entail some elevated risk).

We could cut back on use in the long term by accomplishing population reduction, certainly, but we haven't even got to zero growth yet.

Oh, by the way: I had once toyed with the notion of an exercise bike (or treadmill, or whatever) that provided resistance via back EMF. Which kind of implies a generator. Which in turn implies that one could tap into the dozens of sweating bodies at Bally, for instance, to get a leetle teeny boost for the power grid. I've seen figures like a quarter of a kilowatt over an hour, but that certainly has to be scaled for level of fitness. The human body can put out about 5kW peak in terms of motive power, but few can sustain more than a kilowatt for more than a few seconds.

Probably you couldn't go a long way toward recharging your electric car battery, but you could at least feel like you were doing something.

Glad to see that the 'wasteage' argument has already been conducted before I got here. I wonder how much 'wasteage' we could calculate from running independent coffee shops instead of Starbucks and independent grocery stores instead of WalMarts? (Lack of bulk purchasing and delivery would be a huge 'waste' expense just to start).

What? The independent stores do something that you personally value? I'm not properly valuing that when I call the other stuff 'waste'? Hmm.

I have a friend whose speciality as an architect is energy-recuperating buildings. If I understand her, the field is still getting going, but the gym-generator (an idea I think a lot of us have had) is definitely something they're looking towards.

The drawback of human-generated power is wastage. The human body isn't all that efficient, mechanically, so there's all kinds of power generated that doesn't go into motion: it goes into running the body's engine. Which gets expressed as heat. Which requires cooling. Which, in turn, requires either air conditioning, or a decent fan, or both.

And yet: not a bad idea. Not one that's going to solve our energy needs, but not bad.

Yes, this caring business can become kind of dicey, if you're not careful.

Look at where caring got Andrew Carnegie.

He had to bring in the Pinkertons to shoot a few of his employees who wanted a little less caring and a little more return on their labor. Then, he builds a bunch of libraries where the children of his laborers could go and read about the vanguard of the proletariat, for free mind you, the ingrates. They turned right around and formed unions and moved to the suburbs and got educated enough to call other people "wogs". In fact, they had to import more people from other countries to care enough about them to call them "wogs". Then the wogs asked for a higher minimum wage and health insurance and suddenly we have proposals to send them back to their own damned countries where it's cheaper to care about them and keep creative destruction to our ownselves.

On the other hand, Sally Struthers looks like she wants to give an Emeril Lagasse "BAM" to the bowl of mushed cassava she's handing out to the goiter-infested kids she's prattling on about. She ought to get a real job in one of Pat Robertson's gold mines in Africa, lose a little weight through the new arsenic-leeching diet, and help Pat pay the mortgage on his 73-foot luxury trawler, not that his boat is that small.

Speaking of trawling, what I hate is when I give a guy one of my fish and he's back the next day asking for another fish. I tell him to keep the fish by his bed, but he whines that his rice cooker is taking up too much room and he had to eat the fish.

So, I teach him to fish. Then he's back whining about the sludge coming out of the pipe at the back of my factory which is killing the fish and poisoning the river where I taught him to fish AND he couldn't fish anyway because he slipped a disk moving my lentils from the kitchen to the swimming pool cabana and back again because I decided they clashed with the Hugh Hefner grotto/mermaid theme.

So, I clean up the doggoned river and I give my fish guy some health insurance, and long story short, next time I see him, he's got three fish and I have only one. Plus, I can't find the lentils. Sheesh!

It makes a guy want to move to the Marianas with Tom Delay and Dick Armey, where you can care about people with very low overhead and no heavy-handed regulation. Plus, you can rest your drink on the top of the bargirl's head because she's on her knees doing her second job because she's so tired and underpaid from her 12-hour a day career stitching that little crocodile on to your golf-shirt. You would teach her to fish but she might become some sort of fishing entrepreneur and quit her second job, which is really all Tom Delay cares about.

Rosanne Barr. What about her, you might well ask? Here's a woman, a bit of a suburban schlub, who hated her life because nobody cared about her, and through some biting comedic talent, got all of the other suburban schlubs to care about her so much that they now give her all of their meager fish, which they can't afford to give her, and even though she has more than enough fish for the daily bouillabaisse at posh joints, because she depicts their suburban schlubbery in such a funny way. They care now more about her than she does them.

Now that's fishing.

As Milton Friedman once said to John Maynard Keynes:

"You give them too many fish and my lentil stock goes down, dammit."

And don't get me started on Barbara Streisand sitting in the British Library in the 1830s pondering a way to deduct the overhead costs from her production of "Lentyl" from her taxes.

A little work never hurt anyone, which is why I do as little work as possible.

I don't think I'm a fan of Cadbury (IIRC, it's unbelievably oversweetened, and the eggs are revolting) but I have long been a proponent of the idea that Hershey's "chocolate" is really floor sweepings held together with corn syrup and some food coloring. I wouldn't eat it as a gift, much less buy it.

As for grammarians, I recall hearing Geoff Pullum list rules promulgated in recent how-to grammars, and showing that they are the exact same rules found in grammars written in the mid-19th century. But apparently language, unlike any other aspect of human culture, is not supposed to change. Grrrr.

Round about now it's time for me to mention: (a) Engineer-Poet (left hand side ... no, the other left ... um, never mined, I can't compete with Thullen's depths) has an interesting post about carbon-free or even carbon-negative energy production; and

(b) good ol' sunny California has just adopted AB 32, which should give E-P someplace to practice his trade.

[It's worth remembering that California is the fifth largest economy in the world and is, behind the US, one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.]

[yes, both Sebastian and I will be registering with the Air Resources Board as major emitters of greenhouse gases, thanks for asking. we were unsuccessful in getting an attorney exemption written into the bill.]

[sob.]

[ok, in reviewing this post it appears that the margaritas served as our office's x-mas party hit harder than expected.]

Ara: the ones that leap to mind are: (a) in the case of chocolate, the object of the boycott is companies that actually engage in bad practices, while in the case of cellphones it's a product whose extraction frequently involves bad practices; (b) giving up cell phones can, as you suggested, involve sacrificing your job (and, if you regularly travel on remote deserted roads, possibly your life), whereas giving up chocolate is just a drag, and giving up all chocolate but Cadbury and FT isn't even a minor inconvenience.

Imho, it would be nice if all products whose manufacture possibly involves child labor/civil wars/etc. had some procedure allowing us to tell the OK ones from the bad ones, so that we could tell the difference, and reward the good companies.

Hershey's chocolate has the distinct undertone of vomit. That Americans buy it is a sign that market efficiency is bollocks. You really don't need additional information when your chocolate tastes of sick. That is all.

Ara: I didn't mean the companies themselves should do it; just that some such procedure should exist. I don't think the companies themselves were behind either the (inadequate but better than nothing) certifications for conflict-free diamonds or renewable timber.

I'm not just talking pre-1980, but pre-1960s. Lots of players regularly played two ways (offense and defense - the last in the NFL, IIRC, was Chuck Bednarik) and there were no such animals as specialist "kickers." Usually a back (like Doak Walker, former Heisman winner, RB for the Lions, or QB George Blanda), but occasionally a lineman stepped up to do the job, not some tiny European who'd never seen a game before and would jump up and down afterwards yipping "I keek a touchdown! I keek a touchdown." (Alex Karras's characterization of Garo Yepremian, BTW.)

Groza was not only the best kicker of his era, but started at tackle for the Browns for a decade or so, and was, I believe, All-Pro at least a couple of times.

And - what is more - he kicked it straight ahead, with the TOE of his boot (hence the nickname "Lou the Toe"), none of your round the corner sissy soccer-style sneaking up and kicking it with your damn instep!

Men were Men in those days. And Women were . . . well, frankly, bored much of the time, so I guess that wasn't much different.

Some kickers were born to play linebacker. Matt Petrovich was the place-kicker for Florida until a couple of years ago, and he ran harder (not necessarily faster, mind you) than anyone to make the stop. And occasionally, he did make the first hit. Big boy; loved contact. There was a Florida State kicker who was absolutely HUGE, but he wound up playing for the '49ers (IIRC) and getting into drug trouble.

Engineer-Poet (left hand side ... no, the other left ... um, never mined, I can't compete with Thullen's depths) has an interesting post about carbon-free or even carbon-negative energy production

The thing I appreciate about E-P is that he always comes armed with numbers. The math is easy to access; actual numbers and statistics less so. And he's not afraid to lift his eyes to look at the big picture.

You should mention Jerry Kramer, who was the second string kicker for the Packers. Looking at his site, he's got this, which should be of interest to folks who remember the pre Gogolak kickers. (and a googled webpage with a great Gogolak anecdote)